Interesting issue about being forced to drop XP. What about the number of applications home users may have which will not work, due to lack of suitable drivers, on later OSes. I purchased a device for scanning slides to my PC, which at the time was (and still is a desktop running XP). I later bought a more powerful laptop running Windows 7, and looked forward to using the scanner on the newer and faster machine. But no, I couldn't because there was no driver available for the scanner in Windows 7. Result, I either have to stick with using the older desktop or junk the scanner and buy a newer one.